The GOP and right-wing war on reality; 63% republicans believe Iraq had WMDs. Oh, and Obama is a Muslim. Born in Kenya. Climate science is a scam.

New polling data shows that Republicans believe all kinds of verifiably untrue things to be not only true, but the Truth.

For starters, two-thirds of Republicans believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The Republican party must have amnesia over the outrage of no weapons found in Iraq, it was 9 years ago.

What the polls show, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said Tuesday, is a party obliterated to reality.

That’s what happens when you watch Fox News eh?

Then there is the issue of how the average Republican voter perceives Obama’s religious views:

Over 50% think Obama is a Muslim or “don’t know”. Uh huh…

And on the issue of climate change:

The right believes, Fineman said, that scientists and government bureaucrats are conspiring to rob Americans of their freedom by convincing the world that climate change is real.

As I’ve just been stating, this ‘war on science” has been waged for decades: consider also the prevalence of creationism among the Republican base.

And we’re surprised at the opposition to the science in the United States and within the GOP itself?

Nor can we brush aside the wacky Birtherism (i.e. Obama was not born in the United States and the birth certificate was faked):

And the most recent example of wild-eyed conspiracy theories is that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. That his becoming president was part of a conspiracy that dates back to the 1960s when Obama was born.

As the “theory” goes, Hawaiian state officials faked a birth certificate for Obama, someone ran a phony birth announcement in the local paper nearly 50 years ago, all to pave the wave for little baby Barack to become president some day and institute Sharia law in the United States.

It’s sounds nuts, but the birther craze has reached a lot of Republicans.

In a recent poll, 37 percent of Ohio Republicans who voted in the GOP primary don’t believe Obama was born in the United States, and 21 percent aren’t sure. That means less than half believe he is a natural born citizen.

In a Pew Research Center poll, less than half of all voters believe Obama is a Christian. A whopping 17 percent think he’s Muslim. And of Republicans, 64 percent think he’s Muslim.

It is interesting how very, very quickly this idea has gone “mainstream” – but of course, when you build a culture built upon the conspiracy theories, should we be surprised?

142 thoughts on “The GOP and right-wing war on reality; 63% republicans believe Iraq had WMDs. Oh, and Obama is a Muslim. Born in Kenya. Climate science is a scam.”

The sad thing is that I reckon if you polled the hard core Australian climate denier sites (Jo Nova, Andrew Bolt, Climate Sceptics Party, Galileo Movement,etc), you would find a similar parallel reality. Thanks to Murdoch press, IPA and similar denial enablers.

Sure they are a pale, feeble replica of their US brothers but they suffer from the same distorted world view. The other thing you notice in Australia is the hate and anger the deniers produce. White, middle to late aged men, flailing around trying to blame someone for a mess they helped to make, desperately trying to deny the problem, to deny their culpability in the problem and hating, really hating anyone who suggests solutions.

Eric is a good example (assuming he isn’t a Poe!). Even if he is a Pom, he fits the Aussie profile pretty well. The anger and hate – the constant references to Nazi’s, the constant references to completely discredited information (but in the parallel reality, if an expert says you are wrong, then clearly you are right) and the sheer inability to present even a few cogent points to support his claims shows just how far down the rabbit hole some of these guys have fallen.

To mitigate the risk to my family, we’ve moved from Europe (which in any case is descending into economic chaos, no small thanks to their obsession with alternative energy) back to my native Australia – the Northern part, away from all those cold winters we seem to be experiencing lately.

I find it amusing the way you guys continuously try to demonise your opponents. One axiom of your belief system which none of you dare question is that the evidence for imminent climate catastrophe is overwhelming. From this you infer that anyone who disagrees is defective – they’re bad, mad or stupid.

Yet even the IPCC only claims a greater than 90% probability that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are responsible for global warming, leaving a respectable 10% possibility that they are wrong (they are not claiming the magic 95% scientific certainty). I know you guys made various claims when I pointed this out that the 5% shortfall is due to political machination, but what is your evidence for this? Given that most Western governments have made strong statements in support of climate change mitigation, why would they then hobble the process by forcing the IPCC to water down its assessment?

If you paused to consider the possibility that people who hold different views to yourselves might simply be mistaken, then the world would make a lot more sense to you. This is certainly what I think of you guys – I don’t think you guys are bad, mad or stupid, I think you have made a few mistakes, which have led you to a false conclusion.

All on the website. Press the “Search the Archive” button, top left of the page I linked.

The Eugenics crisis was serious science around the start of the 20th century. They had 3 major international conferences to find ways to address the crisis.

Adolf Hitler was involved in the American movement, through correspondence with leading American Eugenicists, for several decades. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/feb/06/race.usa His rise in Germany was assisted by massive funding from global Eugenics organisations, who supported his reorganisation of Germany according to Eugenic principals. In bankrupt Germany, high level support from wealthy foreigners must have made his rise unstoppable – people would have joined his party just to put food on the table.

You know the best bit? The Eugenics categorisation of Jews as genetically inferior was based on correlation. Early in their research, Eugenicists noticed that poor, uneducated “inferior” people have a lot of children. Jews also tend to have a lot of children, which… I’m sure you can figure out the rest.

Surely thought we’re well beyond such trash science now though – noone these days would be stupid enough to argue that correlation implies causation, would they?

Two Invaluable Web Sites. There are two Web sites that every pro-lifer interested in eugenics should visit.
The first is Kathy O’Keefe’s “Eugenics Watch” Web site at http://www.eugenics-watch.com, which includes the most detailed information available on thousands of members of the American and British Eugenics Societies. If you have questions about an anti-life group or individual and how they may be tied up in eugenics, visit this Web site to find the answers to your questions.
The second “must visit” Web site is sponsored by the Dolan DNA Learning Center of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory at http://www.eugenicsarchive.org.

Not agree with me, just read the science. I could start with 500 preliminary climate science papers for you to read but I know you wont read them and just call the people who wrote them ‘Nazis’.

Once you read those 500, I could then give another 1000. At that stage, you would have a very basic understanding of the science. Would you read them? Nah, easier to deny reality…

On the rare chance you read them I would them give you another 2000 papers to read. You would then have a ‘reasonable’ understanding of the science. Gunna read them? Nah, some guy with an excel spreadsheet disproved AGW with one graph and 3 data points on Jo Nova.

I see – so in your view, the correct way to assess the validity of a scientific theory is to count the peer reviewed papers?

Over 2200 serious scientific papers were written about catastrophist Eugenics, so this approach – counting the papers – would have failed to detect that catastrophist Eugenics was in fact pseudoscience. http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list3.pl

All on the website. Press the “Search the Archive” button, top left of the page I linked.

The Eugenics crisis was serious science around the start of the 20th century. They had 3 major international conferences to find ways to address the crisis.

Adolf Hitler was involved in the American movement, through correspondence with leading American Eugenicists, for several decades. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/feb/06/race.usa His rise in Germany was assisted by massive funding from global Eugenics organisations, who supported his reorganisation of Germany according to Eugenic principals. In bankrupt Germany, high level support from wealthy foreigners must have made his rise unstoppable – people would have joined his party just to put food on the table.

You know the best bit? The Eugenics categorisation of Jews as genetically inferior was based on correlation. Early in their research, Eugenicists noticed that poor, uneducated “inferior” people have a lot of children. Jews also tend to have a lot of children, which… I’m sure you can figure out the rest.

Counting the scientific papers would have failed to detect that catastrophist Eugenics was pseudoscience . There was prolific scientific output, with large teams of international researchers based at premier institutions.

Therefore, counting the papers is clearly not an effective strategy for detecting pseudoscience.

Rubber advanced an argument that weight of paperwork validates a scientific theory. I provided a response showing that this argument is nonsense.

I don’t really know or care what else the organisation behind the archive website believes, unless you are arguing that they faked all the papers? But if they are a bunch of cranks, this simply validates another point I made, about how much damage Climate fraud is doing to science – it is opening the way for other anti-science movements.

You can be as revisionist as you want about Eugenics, but the facts speak for themselves. Scientists are people, and they are as susceptible to hysterical crazes as anyone else. The early 1900s Eugenics crisis movement was global, involved a lot of top educational and scientific institutions, was intolerant of dissent, and ultimately led to the deaths of millions.

Oh yes, and of course the important bit – this entire edifice of academic effort was based on pseudoscience.

You’re forgetting that the scientific establishment, like other branches of the middle class, was a lot smaller in the early 1900s that it is today. And they didn’t have the Internet back then, so a lot of it was not digitised – whereas today, a paper is likely to be available in electronic form before it comes out on paper.

But I find it amusing that you think the problem in the 1900s was the paper did not weigh enough – that a really hefty weight of paper validates a theory.

Members of all American political parties subscribed to the Eugenics craze. Madison Grant, who helped design the famous American immigration act of 1924, corresponded with Hitler. Hitler famously wrote to Madison Grant, praising his book “The Passing of the Great Race” with the statement “This book is my bible”.

1924 was also famous in that it saw a major split in the American Democratic Convention, on whether or not to condemn the Klu Klux Klan.

The American Republicans until quite recently supported the CAGW Craze – it enjoyed a near consensus in America, until Lord Monckton almost single handedly convinced them that it was junk science.

I hope his contribution to breaking your movement is recognised by future historians.

Yes I was wrong about the original site I provided – I thought it had more scientific papers.

I did find something interesting. This appears to be the Eugenics equivalent of an IPCC report, produced following the 1932 International Eugenics Congress. The download is very slow, so be patient with it. I haven’t read it myself yet, so it should be interesting for both of us.

“This appears to be the eugenics equivalent of an IPCC report…” Oh listen to you,you compulsive thing! You’re picking up the tedious habits of a Delingpole,Eric…’if you’ve got nothing at least be provocative’ is the modus,it seems.

Nick, my goal was to demonstrate that large mass delusions happen, even amongst scientists, and scientific institutions.

The Eugenics Conference paper I linked was not written by people who knew they were practicing scientific fraud – it was written by sincere scientists, representatives of many of the world’s premier scientific institutions. The British Royal Society was happy to host one of the International Conferences.

Since the Eugenics hysteria was large, and her international conferences included delegates from a wide range of scientific institutions, I think it reasonable to infer that people who are ensnared by such a hysteria must find the hysteria plausible – it cannot be obvious to victims of a scientific delusion that they are in fact suffering from a scientific delusion.

The Eugenicists believed in what they were doing.

This does not demonstrate that the Climate Crisis is a delusion. But it does demonstrate that large scale scientific delusions are possible.

I certainly believe it is possible to improve a species through careful selective breeding, or genetic manipulation – in my back yard are some excellent products of selective breeding which I hope will yield some yummy vegetables in a few months.

The “junk science” component of the early 1900s Eugenics movement was the belief in an imminent eugenic crisis – the belief that without urgent intervention, humanity would suffer a catastrophic decline, as the few eugenically fit members of society were forced to care for a rising tide of imbeciles and cripples.

I also believe in natural selection and evolution – the weeds which are attacking my vegetables are tough, difficult to eradicate, and seem to be resistant to the weedkiller I’m using on them.

‘But it does demonstrate that large scale scientific delusions are possible’ Really? Are they still possible,given the knowledge we have built on assessing social and scientific history,including the lessons of the eugenics delusion?

Was eugenics a scientific delusion,or a social one that enlisted science to reinforce and legitimise it? The world of science was very different then,as the observational empirical arm of science struggled against coherence and technological shortcomings to keep up with the theorising arm. Science as it functions now is a very different beast. Climate,atmospheric and meteorological science was not born of a social movement,or encouraged by one. It was born to serve a society that needed better prediction for so much of its activities. It just bubbled away for years with little attention from elite or masses. Then incidentally threw up some observations with far-reaching consequences of a scale that made some nervous. Now some of those folk want to delegitimise it so that they can discount the future and dispossess the next generations.

Climate science is a physical science,underpinned by physical laws which work universally and are shared with nearly all other functional disciplines…eugenics was a conviction underpinned by a smattering of nascent biology and the interests of the social elite. Science now is much more resistant to political interference,but it is only allowed limited space on the political stage because, while it is the source of much wealth, it cannot be bought and its messages resistant to reductionism.

It is simple to provide thousands of scientific reports, dating back many decades that firstly highlight the physical processes that drive climate change, secondly show the evidence for AGW (and its effects on the environment) and thirdly provide modelling that is based on these physical mechanisms which shows the likely consequences of continuing to add GHG’s to the atmosphere.

What is harder is to get a person like Eric to actually read some of this science – his worldview is so heavily invested (infested?) with climate change denial that even looking at the science is a no-no. Much easier to try to draw a false equivalence between climate science and eugenics, equate climate scientists to Nazi’s and regurgitate long discredited anti-science blog posts.

And surely this view is contradicted by the existence of the powerful voice of climate “denial”. If you are right about imminent climate catastrophe, then people like myself, who sincerely believe it is all a crock, are the ones suffering from the delusion. This proves that, one way or another, it is happening now.

Eugenics was started by the cousin of Charles Darwin, the scientist Francis Galton. Eugenics also “bubbled away for years”, until it became a major force.

It began as a scientific enquiry, but when their mathematical models (mistakenly) predicted a future catastrophe, it became fashionable – politicians jumped on the bandwagon, proponents of Eugenics gained enormous political power, by demanding action from politicians, and groups with other agendas, such as racism, jumped on the bandwagon, and used the defective predictions of Eugenics to promote their nastiness.

There are vague hints of racism in the new Climate Crisis movement. As the right wing author PJ O’Rourke once pointed out, when discussing Erhlich’s “Population Bomb”, everyone seems to worry about the teeming overpopulation in places like Bangladesh – noone seems to care about the teaming masses in places like Monaco.

Climate science denial does not have a ‘powerful’ voice,certainly not scientifically.. It’s a noisy one without real power….the political noise of climate science denial does no work in the lab or in the field,because it has no utility. If the political power of science denial inhibits research,it will only be temporarily,because physics will not be denied,and physical processes will not be stymied by social power as Cnut realised so long ago.

Eric,it’s good that you can reason that you belong to a sub-group that is potentially delusional. I doubt whether early eugenicists were capable of that kind of detachment,which really is a product of the institutionalising and generational accretion of self-reflective processes in education,and the major lesson of observation: it works if processes are coherent.

Eugenics attempted to put statistics to the service of a bunch of genuinely ludicrous assumptions that had never faced any systematic testing,because its proponents had the social status to decree their ideas were sound. With the spread of effective scientific practise, it crumbled. Scientific practise is even more effective,standardised and tested now.

I don’t see any hint of racism in the ‘Climate Crisis’ movement. The concern is about sustainability of consumption,carbon footprints,preserving biodiversity, and better models for economies. I see many efforts by commentators on the right to deal themselves into the issue by attempting to frame it as primarily a political and resource issue in search of some scientific hardness to justify it. These efforts are a reflection of these commentators trying to move the discussion to ground on which they feel sure: any ground other than science. The ‘teeming poor masses’ thing is a strawman.

And you could put more Bangladeshis into Monaco than Monacoans/Monegasques,because they consume less per capita, and know how to do so. Monaco’s environmental footprint is enormous,they import all of their food,clothing,construction materials and energy,and have to offer tax relief to attract useless pirates to park their global bounties there. The place is full of hopelessly dependent ‘rich’ folk. Very sad place.

Eric ” one of them was a sham, eugenics, therefore they may all be shams”

,
single out climate change from the hundreds as an example of what may be a sham\\

The problem with this reasoning is that it avoids engaging with the issue at hand, and instead shifts attention to extreme hypotheticals. Because no proof is presented to show that such extreme hypotheticals will in fact occur, this fallacy has the form of an appeal to emotion fallacy by leveraging fear. In effect the argument at hand is unfairly tainted by unsubstantiated conjecture.

As far as I know the other fields of science aren’t talking about an imminent global crisis which requires urgent intervention.

If you look at the history of mass pseudoscience hysterias, a claim of imminent crisis seems to be a consistent theme with all of them.

And of course, I have to include climate “denial” with this set – our crisis is the risk that the draconian measures you guys want to implement, to address the imaginary climate crisis, will subvert democracy and freedom.

There seems to be something about a perceived crisis which collectively turns our brains to jelly. My guess is that our hypersensitivity to crisis is a legacy from our distant ancestors. Running away from an imaginary lion is a waste of energy. Failing to run away from a real lion is a fatal mistake.

The interesting thing about the present situation is one of us has to be wrong – either there is an imminent climate crisis, or there isn’t. Though I guess there are shades of grey, such as lukewarmer Richard Muller, author of the BEST study, who claims CO2 / global warming will be a problem in the future, but it isn’t a serious problem yet.

Eric Worrall says:
October 7, 2012 at 3:22 am
As far as I know the other fields of science aren’t talking about an imminent global crisis which requires urgent intervention.

THEREFORE CLIMATE CHANGE MUST BE A SHAM

If you look at the history of mass pseudoscience hysterias, a claim of imminent crisis seems to be a consistent theme with all of them.

THEREFORE CLIMATE CHANGE MUST BE A SHAM

And of course, I have to include climate “denial” with this set – our crisis is the risk that the draconian measures you guys want to implement, to address the imaginary climate crisis, will subvert democracy and freedom.

THEREFORE CLIMATE CHANGE IS A SHAM

There seems to be something about a perceived crisis which collectively turns our brains to jelly. My guess is that our hypersensitivity to crisis is a legacy from our distant ancestors. Running away from an imaginary lion is a waste of energy. Failing to run away from a real lion is a fatal mistake.

THEREFORE CLIMATE CHANGE IS A SHAM

The interesting thing about the present situation is one of us has to be wrong – either there is an imminent climate crisis, or there isn’t. Though I guess there are shades of grey, such as lukewarmer Richard Muller, author of the BEST study, who claims CO2 / global warming will be a problem in the future, but it isn’t a serious problem yet.

“As far as I know the other fields of science aren’t talking about an imminent global crisis which requires urgent intervention.”

Unfortunately, this statement is not accurate. Although not at the level of public debate of AGW, there are a number of resource issues that are causing considerable consternation to the scientists analyzing them. And they should be of concern to all of us, because, like AGW, they have serious implications for the sustainability of (i.e., the continued viability of) our current economic and political system (globalized trade, global capitalism, whatever you want to call it).

Basically, it’s “limits to growth” and related issues, and if you dig around, you’ll find a very similar dichotomy—concerned scientists and analysts trying to get society’s attention, and a community of deniers who say BAU (business as usual) is not a problem.

I categorise “limits to growth” type scares in the same set as the CO2 scare – they’re all saying similar things, based on computer models rather than observations.

The peak oil scare is an interesting case – the rise of shale gas simply busted the model.

If you go back in history, you can find many similar stories.

My personal favourite 1894 horse manure crisis. Cities like London and New York were choking in their own filth. The requirement for massive transport of goods in and out of the city by horse drawn carriage created a crisis – it was impractical for the horse drawn carriages to remove their own manure, because there would have been no room for other goods.

So various crisis meetings were convened, to try to find a way to fix the problem. Dire predictions were made, based on predicted growth of cities, and longer supply chains to service them, that by the 1940s, city streets would be buried under 10ft or more of horse poo.

Meanwhile, people started buying automobiles – cheaper, less prone to accident (horse drawn carriages are hideously dangerous, for occupants and bystanders), and much, much less polluting.

Oil shale does not effectively replace “conventional” oil. You clearly have not read the energy literature and analysis in any depth. If your level of comprehension of basic global resource issues is as poor as your knowledge of climate, you shouldn’t be responding to my post before spending a few hours reading up on the subject. Did you bother to even look at EROI? At least then you might make some sense.

In terms of physical evidence, here and now, all you have is an unusual Arctic ice melt (which coincided with an unusually high level of Antarctic sea ice), a mild warming event which ended 15 years ago (which was no stronger than warming events which have occurred in the 1800s), a global temperature which, according to Keith Briffa of the CRU, was probably matched around a thousand years ago, and scientists who talk, in private, of pressure to tell a nice tidy story. http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0938018124.txt&search=nice+tidy+story

So to believe in the climate crisis, you have to have faith in the computer models of climate scientists, and their public statements of faith in their own models.

At present, here and now, there simply isn’t any real physical evidence of impending climate disaster to back up the computer projections.

The 1930s Eugenics crisis, with its painfully wrong projections of imminent catastrophe, shows how seriously wrong and socially damaging models which predict a future crisis can be, if people try to act to avert the imaginary crisis.

Especially since the arctic decline seems to be occurring at the same time as an increase in Antarctic ice – in defiance of model predictions, which predicted both poles would melt, until they were hastily rewritten to accommodate new, inconvenient facts (now they predict the Antarctic will melt, sometime in the future).

Since the Arctic warming seems to be limited to the Arctic, and seems similar to events which have occurred before, I’d call that regional variation.

Round and round in circles. Not so much an Arctic death spiral as a spiral of collapsing comprehension. Models for Antarctic sea ice project a much slower decline in extent maxima,so the barely significant trend is hardly ‘defiant’.

Eric,Arctic sea ice net change affects weather around Eurasia and North America…so the change is not ‘limited to the Arctic’.

Attempts to make simple number trade offs between ice areas in opposite seasons at opposite ends of the planet are surely too superficial for you to contemplate?
Arctic sea ice extent has dipped in all seasons,in particular collapsing in summer. Arctic sea ice consists of multi-year ice as well as new ice:multi-year ice is on a downward trend as a percentage of each years totals through all seasons.

The Arctic is an ocean. Antarctica is a frozen polar continent that delivers strong outpouring cold blasts over its sea surrounds. Greenland can do this too but is much smaller and is offset from a polar position.

Antarctic sea ice extent shows little trend in any season,just a modest [relative to total area mean] increase in winter. There is no trend in summer extent. IOW mean minimum Antarctic sea ice extent is not increasing. All Antarctic sea ice is one year ice,with bits of ice shelf passing through

Fluctuations in maximum extent have a lot to do with prevailing wind sets in August and September,which can alter areas quite dramatically by spreading or compacting ice. The late extent surge this year may well have been spreading thinning ice pushed out by wind.

Do you have to have a precise date? What possible need do we have for an exact date? Our observations note change,it was predicted tough not closely modelled,we have mechanisms for it and the changes it’s introducing. We now have a modified energy flux regime establishing itself in the Arctic Ocean.

Current CO2 levels and temperature commit us to significant sea level rise over the next century. When there are hundreds of millions of folks in low lying areas,fixed infrastructure and millions of hectares of agricultural land close to sea-level,then the time necessary to scope,secure or abandon areas has already started,whether or not sea level is currently rising at 2 to 3mm/year. So some people and governments are already planning.

The scale of the crisis has a critical bearing on deciding its imminence. We know the scale is global,with some hotspots. And the position that humankind finds itself in 2000-2100; we have a number of converging issues. Indices going exponential point to corrections;do we want to direct the change or just be subject to it?

Take the hyper-productive deltas of a good number of major rivers. Deltas need to continue to accumulate sediment because they are constantly eroding as well as sinking. In the case of some of these we have diminished or cut off [or plan to] the sediment supply. Sinking deltas where millions live, and rising sea level…

We’ve got towns like Ballina where the king tide already emerges from the drains. There’s a lot of footings and infrastructure sitting down there, with millions in property above. We need to be planning levees,pumps and waterproofing now,while the fossil energy is abundantly available to do the heavy lifting.

If we were a post fossil-fuel,sustainable society of only a couple of billion,then we would have the luxury of pacing our response to what is in geological terms a rapid change in climate. We’d have some spare planet. We would have solved the problems of finite energy and productive land. We’d have damped down the political and social crises of inequity, disenfranchisement and disengagement so we’d have a better part of our societal know-how directed at climate change.

But we don’t. We’re still engaged in expansionary dreaming despite our best knowledge.

Hard to know where to start Nick, you really have been drinking the cool-aid, haven’t you?

Current CO2 levels commit… – only if you believe the models which produce such predictions. Those convenient exponential predictions, which so conveniently delay falsification against real world measurements.

Ballina… – doubtful. More likely poor design of maintenance of the storm drain system. I was involved in a case like this a long time ago. It turns out the bad drainage system was approved by a former council chairman, of the same party as the current incumbent, under intriguing circumstances. Very convenient to blame such calamities on “climate change”.

It would be interesting how you intend to achieve a sustainable society of a couple of billion without fossil fuels or an equivalent source of cheap energy. And how would you select the best breeding stock, to contribute to your reduced population? I can point you in the direction of some interesting 1930s research by people who believed they knew how to select the best breeding pairs of people. http://ia700402.us.archive.org/2/items/decadeofprogress00inte/decadeofprogress00inte.pdf

Eric, the projections for the climate are not ‘exponential’. They show acceleration and decay,but nothing exponential. SL rise is not a model idea,it is a physical response to measurable forcing. What they are modelling are rates, not basic properties.

Because of ocean thermal inertia,sea level will keep rising after we burn the last fossil fuel we can get our hands on. At the moment I see no sign that we are pulling back on FF use. So projecting GHG rise is sound. Therefore sea level will continue to rise unless some other forcing like an unprecedented drop in TSI or massive persistent tropical vulcanism can out do GHGs for hundreds of years. Not impossible but very unlikely.

If significant bits of West Antarctica or Greenland go,then SL will show some non-linear response on top of its thermic expansion. Look out. Palaeo records show rapid SLR is possible.

Sea level has until 2000 years ago been generally declining slowly from its Holocene optimum. Deltas can survive if they are fed sediment,but Aswan Dam has done for the Nile. Three Gorges compromises the Yangtse. Look what is planned for the Mekong. Now add up the number of people living there.

Ballina sits on a mud and sand island. Indeed it is not the greatest examplee of forward thinking. King tides have long affected it. King tides on top of SLR will do worse. You can’t count on getting lucky with air pressure and prevailing winds too often. Ballina has been very lucky with a lot of weather factors since the 1970s. There are a lot of Aussie towns and bits of towns on loose sediment close to the sea level. Hows Old Bar doing? Unobtrusive SLR rates get seriously pointy when east coast lows coincide with high tides.

I’m not proposing that ideal 2 billion society,and I’m happy to muck in with everybody else in the situation we find ourselves.. I’m saying that that sort of set up would have been more resilient to the changes we are starting to see and which will continue for several hundreds of years to some equilibrium. Instead of a sustainable human society,we have one expecting to grow in as many ways as you can think of.

You’ve got to try to separate observations from theory and models – they are not the same thing. And you clearly haven’t seen GISS director James Hansen’s boiling oceans rant, if you believe none of the models are exponential.

Because of ocean thermal inertia,sea level will keep rising after we burn the last fossil fuel we can get our hands on … This assumes fossil fuel is responsible for 20th century warming, which is not something I accept. I believe that CO2 must have some influence on climate, but there are substantial anomalies – long periods in the historical record in which CO2 and temperature diverge. The 20th century also witnessed the greatest solar grand maximum for 8000 years. If solar forcing has any impact on climate, then the 20th century would be expected to have exhibited its impact.

And substantial evidence is emerging that the sun does have a significant effect on climate. Svensmark’s theory, that the sun modulates cloud cover, through its influence on cosmic ray bombardment of the Earth’s atmosphere is gathering a lot of support, especially in the Solar Terrestrial Physics community.

Your concern about Ballina – if sea level soars as models predict, then Ballina might have to be abandoned. But sea level rise is not accelerating substantially, and compared to historical episodes of sea level change, current sea level is essentially static.

RE human society growing, I have yet to see a convincing argument why we cannot continue to grow.

7/8ths of the planet – the oceans – have barely been tapped for resources. There are vast deposits of oil and minerals which are simply not yet economical to recover, but which advances in robotics and materials science will bring into reach. And when the oceans are exhausted, it will be possible to reach further afield.

Ever hear of Project Orion? I sincerely hope we find another way into space – Project Orion is dirty, damaging, and in many ways utterly undesirable. But if we ever have to launch millions of tons into space in one launch, for a few dollars per ton, to say set up an industrial scale space mining operation, then then a Project Orion based vehicle could do it.

“You’ve got to try to separate observations from theories and models” .

My first para [in the rant you responded to] does precisely that. It does not take a model to predict SLR from the data in front of us because of observations and physical laws. Models are there to suggest bounds,test all scenarios by selecting inputs, and make projections BASED ON OBSERVATIONS and SOUND PHYSICS.

You reject CO2/GHGs as ultimately causative,but physics and atmospheric observation tell us this is the cause..unless you want to dispute the radiative properties of all GHGs which are known to a high resolution,and posit another theory of atmospheres.

CO2 induced warming was predicted to warm the lower troposphere and cool the stratosphere because of CO2s basic properties and the way it mixes throughout the atmosphere. This has been OBSERVED,in confirmation of the science.Solar induced warming will warm ALL layers of the atmosphere. Solar changes have contributed to the last 150 years of warming and the variation seen,but cannot explain much of it.

Svensmark’s theory has been examined and found lacking.The mechanisms posited to lead ultimately to cloud formation have not been demonstrable as of any significance given the many other known sources of nucleates ever present in a turbulent atmosphere

Infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Ultimately,we will not be able to divert all energy to our needs. We have picked the low hanging fruit: all fossil reserves are getting more energy expensive to extract leading to bottlenecks…bottlenecks which will impose restraint on resource extraction,manipulation and consumption. Its physical.

Most sceptics and alarmists are agreed that, from basic physics, CO2 should cause around 1c warming / doubling.

Where we part company is on what happens next.

Alarmists think water vapour, a powerful GHG, sits in the air, soaking up heat – a potent positive feedback.

Sceptics think extra water vapour is more likely to form more clouds – a potent negative feedback.

In addition, your discussion of solar heating ignores solar modulated cloud formation, a far more potent forcing than direct insolation variation. Even a small change in cloud cover, on a global scale, has a substantial impact on climate.

And conditions in the 20th century were conducive to minimum cloud cover – the 20th century solar grand maximum (a peak not seen for 8000 years) coincided with abnormally low flux of cloud seeding cosmic rays.

eric ” Sceptics think extra water vapour is more likely to form more clouds – a potent negative feedback”

.

All of the Atmospheric Global Climate Models used for the kind of climate projections reported on by the IPCC take the effects of clouds into account. You can read a discussion about cloud processes and feedbacks in the IPCC TAR.

It is true however that clouds are one of the largest sources of uncertainty in the GCM’s. They are very complicated to model because they have both positive feedbacks, preventing surface heat from escaping back into space and negative feedbacks, reflecting incoming sun light before it can even reach the surface. The precise balance of these opposing effects depends on the time of day, the time of year, the cloud’s altitude, the size of the water droplets and/or ice particles forming the clouds, the latitude, the current air temperature and the cloud’s size and shape. On top of that, different types of clouds will interact, amplifying or mitigating each other’s effect as they co-exist in different layers of the atmosphere. There are also latent heat considerations as water vapour condenses during cloud formation and precipitation events and as water droplets evaporate when clouds dissipate.

The ultimate contribution to global temperature trends is very uncertain, but according to the best estimates is likely to be positive over the coming century. There is no indication anywhere that any kind of cloud processes will stop greenhouse gas driven warming, and this includes observations of the past as well as modelling experiments.

Try to read this bit slowly – the sun has a direct influence on cloud cover.

It is being taken seriously enough that the science community allocated a serious amount of time for the CERN particle accelerator, to determine whether high energy particles could form cloud seeds. The result – small cloud seed like particles were observed in the air samples after bombardment with high energy particles. The particles observed in CERN were too small to seed clouds, but the experiment certainly indicated that high energy particles can cause clumping of atmospheric gasses into larger particles.

In addition, several other peer reviewed studies have confirmed that changes in incoming high energy radiation alters cloud cover, in realtime.

The sun modulates high energy radiation, through the solar magnetic field and solar wind deflecting particles which would otherwise strike the Earth’s atmosphere.

When the sun is quiet, high energy cosmic ray flux is high – lots of clouds, cooler climate.

establishing a significant GCR/cloud/climate link would require the following steps (given that we have known that ionisation plays a role in nucleation for decades). One would need to demonstrate:

… that increased nucleation gives rise to increased numbers of (much larger) cloud condensation nuclei (CCN)
… and that even in the presence of other CCN, ionisation changes can make a noticeable difference to total CCN
… and even if there were more CCN, you would need to show that this actually changed cloud properties significantly,
… and that given that change in cloud properties, you would need to show that it had a significant effect on radiative forcing.
Of course, to show that cosmic rays were actually responsible for some part of the recent warming, you would need to show that there was actually a decreasing trend in cosmic rays over recent decades – which is tricky, because there hasn’t been

Abstract: “A recent study has suggested a link between the surface level diurnal temperature range (DTR) and variations in the cosmic ray (CR) flux. As the DTR is an effective proxy for cloud cover, this result supports the notion that widespread cloud changes may be induced by the CR flux. If confirmed, this would have significant implications for our understanding of natural climate forcings. Here, we perform a detailed investigation of the relationships between DTR and solar activity (total solar irradiance and the CR flux) from more than 60 years of NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data and observations from meteorological station data. We find no statistically significant evidence to suggest that the DTR is connected to either long-term solar periodicities (11 or 1.68-year) or short-term (daily timescale) fluctuations in solar activity, and we attribute previous reports on the contrary to an incorrect estimation of the statistical significance of the data. If a CR–DTR relationship exists, based on the estimated noise in DTR composites during Forbush decrease (FD) events, the DTR response would need to be larger than 0.03°C per 1% increase in the CR flux to be reliably detected. Compared with a much smaller rough estimate of −0.005°C per 1% increase in the CR flux expected if previous claims that FD events cause reductions in the cloud cover are valid, we conclude it is not possible to detect a solar related responses in station-based or reanalysis-based DTR data sets related to a hypothesized CR–cloud link, as potential signals would be drowned in noise.”

Correlation between CO2 and temperature is feeble. This is why your climate heroes have had to resort to arguments such as “if its not CO2, what is it?”. That argument is now falling apart, thanks to Svensmark’s theory.

No one is predicting a “runaway” greenhouse effect,Eric. [Venus is an example of runaway,with so much CO2 that water has boiled out of the system.] They are predicting a GT rise,with flow on effects in the ocean/atmosphere system,then an equilibration as fossil fuels are exhausted, then the drawdown of CO2 by the natural processes which at the moment are partly overwhelmed by our rate of ACO2 dumping.

Periods in the past with higher much CO2 also saw significantly different physical set-ups: continents were arranged differently,and solar output was weaker ‘faint young sun]. So different albedo,different oceanic circulation,lower TSI explains different,non-analogous climate to present.

The most recent past analog [125,000 years/bp] for today saw CO2 at or slightly above current levels,continents in very close to current positions,TSI the same…and sea level 4-6metres higher….so remembering oceanic thermal lag times,this suggests that we are heading for that SL over the next hundreds of years.

As for a ‘poor correlation between CO2 and climate’,ice cores show a profound correlation: the slight lag that you naysayers often insist ‘shows’ CO2 cannot affect climate. It works both ways,T rise from a forcing feedbacks to rise in CO2 and more T, or a rise in CO2 leads to T rise. What makes current situation so fascinating is that our CO2 spike is the most massive and rapid rise seen in palaeohistory. 1 to 2ppm/annum,whereas past movements were in the order of 1ppm/century to 1ppm/thousand years.

As for Svensmark,’you’ve got to separate theory from observations’. Wishful thinking will not induce CR mediated nucleation to be a significant or dominant source of nucleation. CERN test has demonstrated that.

Well,no one -except James Hansen- believes a boiling ocean outcome is possible😉. In that he regard he is an outlier. So it seems he has claimed this as a possibility in his popular writing. But his science publication record does not offer it as a possibility. I’m really quite puzzled by his position on this point. I’ll concede that Hansen has gone the partial flake on that…maybe his position is tens of degrees of warming are possible [true],and that’s his ‘runaway’.I’d have to read the book to find out.

I have not seen any calculations that would enable boiling runaway–we don’t get enough solar energy at current levels of solar activity–,though technically we have enough fossil carbon and water to get to a threshold, the CO2 needs to be put into the air quickly enough for the system to go critical and you need all cloud feedbacks to go your way,so to speak.. There are obvious limits to FF access–equipment capacities,transport capacities,shipping volumes and speeds– and how quickly we can combust FFs…as I’ve said elsewhere,the easy stuff is gone,the overburdens are deeper,the sites more remote, the energy concentration per mined volume is lower with shales and tar sands. We need to keep an eye on CO2 sinking processes: if capacities shrink and drawdown rates slacken then more CO2 stays airborne per unit emitted.

I don’t agree with Hansen that Antarctica could go in a century: there is no past evidence for this happening at this pace. It is too massive to go that quickly,and ocean thermal inertia is our friend in slowing warming rates,particularly with the continental distribution we have currently: the Drake Passage allows for a strong isolating circum-antarctic current.

But Antarctica does not have to go much for it to be a serious problem.

I see this as progress – we have established we agree that Hansen is a flake. And I agree about the circumpolar current.

Now it gets interesting – why aren’t the CRU etc. denouncing Hansen as a flake, who is potentially bringing their science into disrepute? They seem to have no problem with calling people who disagree with their alarmism “deniers”, so why don’t they feel similarly about people like Hansen who are too alarmist?

Well,Eric,let’s try and keep a sense of proportion. I said he’d done a partial flake,not that he’s a complete flake.

Hansen has suggested a not impossible but very far-fetched idea in his popular writing,but his hard science and theorising publication record is extensive and well regarded….except by genuine flakes. He’s paid his dues: he very closely predicted the current temperature trajectory,in stark contrast to GW rejectionists. He is a highly regarded team leader. Is it because the idea seems alarming it must be unacceptable? Must others think that what he says is alarmist AND wrong? Maybe they just think he’s wrong.

The idea he has suggested may be eye-catching,but I’m sure it does not dominate the content of his book. It’s probably suggested as an alarming possibility. There may even be a disclaimer that this is his opinion and not that of his employer.

It’s not the job of other institutions or scientists in an official capacity to police what Hansen says as an individual in a non-institutional publication.

So a radical alarmist position is a little quirky, but otherwise acceptable. A less alarmist position (e.g. Richard Lindzen’s estimate of 0.5c +/- 0.5c climate sensitivity) makes you a denier.

Bear in mind, Lindzen’s top estimate of 1c climate sensitivity is only 0.5c away from the lower limit studied by the IPCC in AR4, while Hansen’s boiling oceans scenario is well above the wilder estimates at the top end of the IPCC estimates.

More alarmism is quirky but OK, less alarmism is unacceptable.

I wonder if that is the “pressure to tell a nice tidy story” which CRU professor Keith Briffa alluded to, in one of the Climategate emails?

Lindzen’s lowball sensitivity estimates ,derived by mishandling data from too small an area,have actually been disproven by the past centuries observations…giving them credence is pretty flaky. They were dead in the water [pun intended] from the start. , Hansen’s is dismissable…and as John noted,it’s completely academic because harmful change will have had its way with us long before the oceans evaporated.

Further up thread,in reply to my question why hadn’t your idealised water feedbacks modulated out past climate change [but was magically going to mitigate this one], you gave a complete non-seqitur of a reply: ‘because past climate change wasn’t caused by CO2’ ….Eric,it does not matter what forcing causes a warming, a warmer atmosphere holds more water! So, there’s the extra potential atmospheric water,where was the magical cloud feedback response?

Watch the video again. Hansen is not “predicting a runaway greenhouse effect.” He is describing the possibility of c. 9°C if we shove all the fossil carbon into the atmosphere, cause rapid melting of ice (and I agree one century is probably not possible, but a millenium, maybe not), plus clathrates/methane. 9°C could or could not tip to Venus state, but it’s irrelevant. We and likely the rest of the biosphere will all be dead. Do you really want to risk even a small chance of that, moron?

here is one of your mates that got thrashed in the Gympie times yesterday

Editor,

The Gympie Times,

Dear Sir,

JOE McLeod (The Gympie Times 29 Sept) tells us that any scientific consensus on global warming is irrelevant but he then refers to a petition signed by 31,000 U.S. scientists who deny the science of global warming. Sounds like a lot? In perspective, that number is actually 31,000 compared to the 11 million qualified U.S scientists who did not sign the Oregon petition. Irrelevant indeed Joe. Every scientific institution on earth has statements supporting our understanding of the science, which comes from the peer reviewed literature, not from a show of hands. Joe then refers to the 2010 BBC statement from Phil Jones of the Hadley Climate Research Unit that the warming since 1995 was not statistically significant.

Statistical significance does not just refer to the actual amount of warming but rather, to what is the driver of that warming, whether the warming may be just due to natural variation or is there an underlying cause?

Twelve months later, on June 10 2011, Jones confirmed in a later BBC interview that the warming was now statistically significant but which Joe fails to mention, Jones was confirming that now there was less than a 5% chance that the warming was due to natural variation. The warming itself did not change over the twelve months, it just continued long enough to confirm that its significance could be attributed to enhanced green house effect from our ongoing use of fossil fuels.
rgds

you must live in SE QLD eric send your letter to the editor like poor old joe

You can’t, because your crisis only exists in defective computer models created by alarmist scientists.

Just as the 1930s Eugenics crisis only existed in flawed mathematical models created by the world’s leading scientific research institutions.

The imminent catastrophe is a figment of your imagination, and the imagination of scientists who believed in the catastrophe before they studied it.

You are the one making the extraordinary claims – that the biosphere is about to turn hostile, and hurt us. Prove it.

The damage done by measures to address your imaginary crisis may achieve a similar scale to the damage done by efforts to address the imaginary Eugenics crisis. For example, people are suffering today, now, because of climate alarmist support for biofuel subsidies.

Eric does not think that loss of ones house in a flood or bushfire is catastrophic for the family
he does not regard the farmer that loses his livelyhood due to a massive drought as catastrophic
eric does not regard those killed by a catastrophic heatwave relevant

As I said before, you can show Eric thousands of peer reviewed climate science papers, yet his world-view means he cant read them and wont accept the science. The models he holds in such disdain have done a pretty good job of predicting global temps and SLR. They have been poor in predicting ASI – grossly underestimating the impact of AGW on the Arctic.

Eric’s constant references to Nazis and eugenics shows that he if flailing around, desperately trying minimise the dissonance. Expect the hate to increase the more you challenge his denial. And more logical fallacies.

I wouldn’t care what you believe, except that your beliefs have wider consequences, some of which impact me. Thankfully acceptance of the need to mitigate “dangerous” climate change appears to be on the wane.

I couldn’t care less what you believe loopy, except when it impinges on me. Then I have to take an interest.

I would be upset if the state religion decided I couldn’t eat pork. I’m equally upset when the state religion demands I use flickery low energy light bulbs, as they did in the UK. I see it as an imposition, because it is not my religion.

The development of biofuels is an important component for interim and long term alternative fuels. Establishment of biofuel processes should be subject to stringent analysis and environmental assessments prior to production.

Using agricultural food products to produce biofuels should be avoided in all circumstances. Biofuel production has the potential to substantially aggravate existing pressures on ecosystems, biodiversity, soil health, global warming, agricultural crop species diversity and water supplies, whether produced in Australia or imported.

support

Restricting the sources of biofuels to genuine waste.
Banning the importation or domestic production of biofuel sources such as palm oil that compromise recovery of endangered species, biodiversity and sustainable land use management.
Ensuring that crops grown for biofuel production are based on ecologically sustainable practices such as zero land and soil degradation, optimal conservation of water and protection of the river systems
A moratorium on the cultivation of GEOs for any part of the biofuel production process.
Prioritisation of research and development into second and third generation biofuels including algae to biodiesel and cellulosic fuels over the extension of the ethanol excise rebate.
Amending environment and planning laws to provide targeted environmental assessment of biofuel production including soil impacts, invasive species impact and water use impacts.
Cancellation of the ethanol excise rebate and a diversion of this government expenditure into development of non-fossil fuel based transport and second generation biofuels production.
so are you ignorant or just a compulsive liar eric?

Perhaps Mike could do an article calling for an end to subsidies for biofuels produced from anything other than waste.

Who knows, maybe the subsidies are still rolling, despite opposition from environmentalists and alarmists, because corrupt industrialists have gotten onto the green bandwagon, and are hiding their filthy corruption under a mantle of green altruism.

If you read the 1930s Eugenics equivalent of an IPCC report which I linked – file:///Users/eworrall/Desktop/decadeofprogress00inte.pdf – you will see a lot of tables, discussion of statistical analysis and of the mathematics behind their theories.

Their theoretical models were sophisticated, frightening, and totally wrong.

Nice correlation between solar activity and temperature, as you can see.

The final anomaly, who knows – there are other forcings. Given that CO2 has risen by about 20% since 1980, there might even have been a CO2 component of the rise. But since around 1995, the rise in temperatures has tailed off, despite an accelerating rise in CO2. So once again, CO2 is in trouble as a major climate forcing.

John is wonderfully succinct,but here I go…..What ‘sawtooth pattern’? What ‘pattern’? A pattern is regular. There is nothing absolutely regular there. Just weather and pseudo-periodic events. There is nothing about the last decade of the graph that insists it must be the first quarter of a ‘flat period’ of known length…that’s your eye leading your brain.

Dominic Kniveton
Department of Geography, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK

Svensmark et al. (2009) have recently claimed that strong galactic cosmic ray (GCR) decreases during ‘Forbush Decrease (FD) events’ are followed by decreases in both the global liquid water cloud fraction (LCF) and other closely correlated atmospheric parameters. To test the validity of these findings we have concentrated on just one property, the MODIS LCF and examined two aspects: 1) The statistical chance that the decrease observed in the LCF is abnormal. 2) The likelihood of the observed delay (∼5 to 9 days) being physically connected to the FD events. On both counts we conclude that LCF variations are unrelated to FD events: Both the pattern and timing of observed LCF changes are irreconcilable with current theoretical pathways. Additionally, a zonal analysis of LCF variations also offers no support to the claimed relationship, as the observed anomaly is not found to vary latitudinally in conjunction with cosmic ray intensity.

If we reach 5-6 degrees Celsius of warming, average global temperatures will be hotter than they have been for the last 50 million years. The entire Arctic would be ice-free all year round. Sea levels will rise so rapidly that coastal cities across the world will be abandoned by environmental refugees in their millions.
And past 6 degrees Celsius of warming, the danger of runaway climate change is inevitable, perhaps spurred by the escape of oceanic methane stored below the sea bottom, and released as the deep ocean water becomes increasingly warm. Over time the seas will be nothing but a vast dead zone. The few remaining humans will retreat to highland areas and the polar regions. Perhaps 90% of species will become extinct, beating the worst mass extinctions in the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history[8].
These drastic scenarios are predictable with a high degree of confidence. Many of the processes described are already clearly measureable. It seems increasingly likely that we will exceed the critical 2 degrees of warming before the end of this century. This being the case, part of our focus should be on preparing the worst-affected areas to adapt.

Some people take comfort from the fact that there have been times in the history of the planet when greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than now. The world was very different, but there was no runaway greenhouse and life endured. James Hansen devotes the entire tenth chapter of Storms of My Grandchildren to considering whether this assessment is valid. Three things give him pause:

The sun is brighter now than it was during past periods with very high greenhouse gas concentrations. The 2% additional brightness corresponds to a forcing of about 4 watts per square metre and is akin to a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
For various reasons, the greenhouse gas concentrations in past hot periods may not have been as high as we thought.
We are introducing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere far more quickly than natural processes ever did. This might cause fast (positive) feedback effects to manifest themselves forcefully, before slower (negative) feedback effects can get going.
He also explains that the sharp warming that took place during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) were not caused by fossil fuels (which remained underground), but rather by the release of methane from permafrost and clathrates. If human emissions warm the planet enough to release that methane again, it could add a PETM-level warming on top of the warming caused by human beings.

The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane clathrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the fossil fuel warming. After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet, perhaps permanently? While that is difficult to say based on present information, I’ve come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.